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Live Monitoring Calls for Performance Improvement

Monitoring of agents’ calls, coupled with Engage Coaching and e-Learning software, equips agents with knowledge and tools to better understand their strengths and weaknesses, fostering better performance, empowerment and morale.

The Challenge

As manager of a small contact center, Carlos monitors the activity of his agent’s calls. On a weekly basis, he spends an hour with each employee while they are handling calls, essentially auditing their work. During these audits he finds that the agents handle the calls efficiently. The calls are completed in a timely fashion and their data entry in the CRM application is smooth. The agents are quickly able to complete one call and move to the next, and he is pleased with this performance.

When reviewing operations reports, however, Carlos sees a discrepancy. When he is performing the audit of the agents, the handle time of the calls is quick and efficient but when no audit is being done, the handle time increases substantially.

Carlos must find a way to capture both the phone calls and the screen activity and use those recorded interactions for coaching sessions. Additionally, he wants to implement a best practice tying increased efficiency to performance pay increases and the opportunity to bid for preferred jobs and the more desirable work schedules. He believes this will be received by the staff as motivation for better performance rather than punishment for unsatisfactory work.

After explaining the proposed program to his team, he contacts his telephony provider to inquire about Call Recording solutions.

The Solution

His reseller partner recommends Engage Call Recording and Screen Capture from TelStrat to meet his requirements. He learns that the Engage solution also supports Live Monitoring of not only the voice conversation but also of the desktop screen activity while the calls are taking place.

While the calls are in progress, Carlos can select any active call for agents within his group. He chooses a call, clicks the Live Monitor icon and selects whether to monitor just the audio or both audio and video. When he selects both, a new window opens on the screen and he can see the activity on the agent’s screen and listen to the call on the headset attached to his computer. As he sees the activity he sends instant messages to the agent to coach their performance, providing answers when they hesitate, or making suggestions to upsell an ancillary product.

He can also monitor desktop activity when an agent is not on a call. When he walks around the contact center everyone seems to be working diligently, but his reports show him that certain agents are going into a “not ready” state fairly often and he wants to understand why. As he live monitors their computer screen activity, he finds a few who are surfing the web, or playing solitaire rather than taking another call. Carlos explains to them that excessive “not ready” time also affects their overall performance ratings and he soon sees an improvement.

The Engage solution allows Carlos to also randomly select recorded calls at any time and watch/listen to the activity to see how well his agents handle the calls when he is not monitoring live.

Through successful implementation of this program, coupling monitoring with coaching, Carlos is able to increase both efficiency and employee satisfaction, thus reducing agent attrition. He has improved the contact center work environment with a common goal of exceeding expectations and each agent challenging the others to do better. This is a “win-win” outcome, delivering benefit to the company and employees.